Jive

Andrew Downes

August 29, 2016 13:39

Watershed can receive data from any xAPI conformant Activity Provider. Many Watershed cards are flexible and you can configure Watershed to display useful visualizations and metrics from almost any xAPI data set. To help you get the most out of your data, we’re working with a number of product vendors to ensure that the data they send is optimized to produce the best possible results in Watershed. We want to help you to configure Watershed cards in the best way possible to display that data.

Jive is a social collaboration platform that enables users to share ideas, resources and discussions. All sorts of Jive activity is displayed to users in an Activity Stream, including posted files and links, comments and likes. We’ve worked with one of our clients to develop a connector for Jive. Watershed clients can take advantage of this connector to track all of the data in Jive’s activity stream to Watershed and report on it alongside other learning and performance data.

Installing the Jive xAPI Connector

The Jive Connector is a small PHP application configured to pull data from Jive and push data to your Watershed account as a scheduled task. That means you’ll need a PHP server to put the code on. You’ll also need to set up a scheduled task to run the code daily, hourly or however often you want to send data.

The connector works by hooking into Jive’s Activity Streams implementation, a specification which has a lot of similarity with xAPI. This means that the connector is able to translate all Jive events, even those it was not specifically designed to translate.

Of course, the xAPI data is only as good as the underlying Activity Streams data and in some cases custom translation code may be required for custom Jive events. It also means that the connector is limited to the kinds of events that appear in Jive’s Activity Stream, which does not currently include accessing content. Additional events can be captured with development work.

Contact us to get a copy of the code and to discuss any questions that you or your technical team may have.

Reporting on Jive data

Data from Jive mainly relates to platform activity and social interactions. Using Explore’s simple configuration, you can quickly create reports that compare people, activities and time periods by Jive usage. You can also compare Jive usage to success in assessments, job performance and business metrics. We recommend the Activity Count and Interaction Count measures to report on that activity.

Advanced configuration enables you to get a lot more granular in reporting on Jive activity. It lets you ask questions like: ‘who is interacting with what content?’, ‘which content is most liked or commented on?’ or ‘what kinds of actions are individual people completing in Jive?’

The Watershed team will help you set up these Advanced configuration cards, and the sections below give an explanation of the configuration used to create them.

Advanced filters

The following filter properties can be use with Jive. See Advanced Configuration for more details on advanced filters in general.

Jive only

Use a context activities filter to report only on data from a particular Jive instance:

"contextActivityIds": {
"ids": [
"https://example.jiveon.com"
]
}

Replace https://example.jiveon.com with the url of your Jive installation.

Verb filters

You can use a verb filter to report only particular actions, for example:

"verbIds": {
"ids": [
"http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/like"
]
}

Some examples of Jive actions are outlined in the table below and your particular Jive installation may have others.

Action

Verb id

Liked

http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/like

Marked as helpful

jive:helped

Created

http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/create

Updated

http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/update

Commented on

http://adlnet.gov/expapi/verbs/commented

Activity Type filters

You can use an activity type filter to report only on actions relating to particular types of thing. For example:

Some examples of Jive activity types are outlined in the table below and your particular Jive installation may have others.

Activity Type

Activity type id

Document

http://id.tincanapi.com/activitytype/document

Forum topic

http://id.tincanapi.com/activitytype/forum-topic

Idea

http://id.tincanapi.com/activitytype/suggestion

Space or group

http://id.tincanapi.com/activitytype/community-site

Advanced dimensions

Dimensions control how data is organized. See Advanced Configuration for more details on advanced dimensions in general. In most cases, the dimensions available in simple configuration are sufficient. You can use advanced configuration to create additional dimensions if required.

Organize by statement Id

Sometimes you want to look at each xAPI statement individually, for example to see all comments in a gathering or a complete list of searches made in a particular time period. This can be achieved by organizing by statement id and using a ‘value measure’ as described in the measures section below. Use the following syntax to organize by statement id.

{
"type": "STATEMENT_PROPERTY",
"statementProperty": "id"
}

Advanced measures

The following types of measures can be used with Jive data. See Advanced Configuration for more details on advanced measures in general.

Count and distinct count measures

Advanced measures for Jive data tend to be a count or distinct count aggregation combined with one of the advanced filters outlined above. For example:

For example, the above configuration can be used in a leaderboard organized by statement id in order to display a complete list of comments. The LAST aggregation can also be used with other statement properties such as the actor and activity name.